Astronaut on space travel: There’s nothing to compare it to’

Dr. Janet Kavandi has moved into NASA management now, but from 1998-2001 she went into space three times.

John Hacker

Dr. Janet Kavandi has moved into NASA management now, but from 1998-2001 she went into space three times.

From June 2 to 12, 1998, she rode in the shuttle Discovery as a mission specialist and one of two space rookies on STS-91, the final space shuttle mission to the Russian space station Mir before that spacecraft was intentionally crashed into the Pacific Ocean after more than 15 years in space.

From Feb. 11 to 22, 2000, Kavandi rode in the shuttle Endeavour for the “Shuttle Radar Topography Mission” that produced super-high resolution maps of the Earth using radar.

Then, from July 12 to 24, 2001, she flew on mission STS-104 on the Shuttle Atlantis on the 10th International Space Station construction mission to deliver the Quest Joint Airlock, which allowed station crewmembers to leave the station and conduct space walks for a variety of purposes.

Kavandi said it’s very difficult to describe space flight in words.

“It’s unlike any other experience,” Kavandi said. “There’s nothing to compare it to, so I always hesitate when people ask. It’s a common question, but it’s still hard to answer because there’s nothing like it on Earth.

“If you start with the launch, it’s the thrill of a lifetime because there’s a huge amount of acceleration, noise, shaking, and everything and when the engines cut off after eight and a half minutes, you go from three or three and a half Gs to nothing all of a sudden so you are thrown forward in your seat and your arms lift up and you realize that you really are in micro-gravity.

"Then, you see the Earth for the first time and that’s just amazing. If you’ve ever seen an IMAX movie, one of those very large films, it looks just like that. That movie really impresses you, only in space you’re floating.

“It takes a few seconds to soak in that you are really there and in space, but it’s really interesting. You see things you don’t expect to see. You automatically react to things as if you were on the ground and you try to catch things except that they don’t fall.”

She said working in a micro-gravity environment lets people do unique things that just aren’t possible in the 1 G environment we all live in.

“You learn that you can do any job in any orientation very easily,” Kavandi said. “It’s actually much easier to do things upside down sometimes, you can eat upside down, you can sleep upside down if you want. I used to sleep on the ceiling just because I could and you can’t ever do that anywhere else, so I would do it just to say I did. But your brain learns to adjust very quickly after you’ve been in space a little while.”

Kavandi said space station crewmembers get more time to relax and take in the sights as they whiz around the earth for six months at a time. A shuttle crew, which only spends around two weeks in space, doesn’t have the time to enjoy the view nearly as much.

“You get really worn out in space,” Kavandi said. “It’s a lot of energy spent. The list of tasks is huge and you really have a very short amount of time to do a whole bunch of work. You’re up there for two weeks and you’re trying to squeeze in five weeks worth of work. The disadvantage is you don’t get the opportunity to stop and think about where you are enough and look out the window and see the things that you might want to see on the surface.

“If you wave off a landing and have to stay up an extra day then you can take pictures on that day, you can watch night passes and day passes,” she said. “Some of the most beautiful areas I’ve seen is when I got a night pass over Europe and Africa. Europe, you can see the entire continent outlined, you can see all the lights of the major cities in Europe, you can see Rome and Paris and London, you can see Italy outlined very clearly in the Mediterranean.

"Then you pass over Africa and where Europe is very densely populated and has lots of lights, then you go over Africa and it’s so dark. But they have magnificent thunderstorm over Africa. It’s just very hard to express the intensity of those storms, how bright they are and the beauty of the lightning and the lightning in the clouds and how they pop up and down over the continent.

"Then you can see the Southern Lights and the Northern Lights and you can see the constellations in the Southern Hemisphere, which are not what we get to see up here in the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Cross and some of the things that I had never seen before because I had never been to the Southern Hemisphere before.”

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